I lowered my head beneath the surface, savoring the embrace of warm, lavender-scented water around my face, my ears, my hair. When I emerged, Joe went on, speaking right next to the gushing faucet: “Do you know that Molotov is not his real name? He changed it as a young Bolshevik. Because the Russian word for hammer is molotok. And that’s what he is: Stalin’s hammer.”
I nodded. Joe did not need to go on. In spite of the Molotovs’ gifts of bread and salt, their smiles and chatter at dinner, we were under no illusions; we had been sent to make friends for Roosevelt in Moscow, but that was only because, as bad as Stalin and his lackeys were, Roosevelt suspected that Hitler and his Nazis might be worse.
As if on cue, we heard sleigh bells begin to jingle outside our windows, below us on the black, snow-covered streets. Joe looked at me, frowning, and I nodded. We both knew what that jingling sound meant: while it might have seemed merry enough back home, even part of some quaint Christmas carol, we had come to learn that here, at this midnight hour, it was the sound of one of the dreaded NKVD sleighs making a most undesirable house call. Just a moment later, a shrill burst of voices. A peppering of gunshots, more shouting—women’s terror-stricken shrieks—a crying baby. And then worst of all, nothing. The streets blanketed in snow and quiet once more, only the bark of a distant dog and the receding tinkle of the sleigh. And the unspoken trembling of a city awoken by fear.
* * *
Polina Molotova welcomed me into her roomy car, a sleek black limousine with four doors that looked an awful lot like one of our American Packards, though of course I saw a Soviet logo had been attached, a small hammer and sickle gleaming atop both its trunk and hood.
I took my seat next to Madam Molotova, as her interpreter attended us from the front seat. “Welcome, Madam Davies. Thank you for joining us,” Madam Molotova said, her lipsticked mouth a tight, bright slash against her pale face. And then, gesturing to a woman seated on her other side, she added, “Please meet Madam Litvinova.”
I extended my hand toward the woman beside Polina and was stunned when she addressed me directly, with a ready smile and crisp, perfect English. “Mrs. Davies, it is my pleasure. I’m Ivy Litvinova, wife to Commissar Maxim Litvinov. Really, it’s so nice to meet you.”
“Oh,” I said, sitting back against the plush seat of the car, not sure what to make of her flawless, upper-class British accent.
Ivy Litvinova flashed a quick grin, nodding once. “Yes, I’m a Brit. I met Maxim in London, you see. Back when I was called Ivy Teresa Low.”
“I see,” I said, smiling at her, feeling as though, suddenly, I might have an ally in this bleak, foreign place.
But just then Madam Molotova rattled something off in stern Russian toward the front of the car, where the translator sat beside the chauffeur, and the young aide turned to me and said: “Madam Davies, Madam Molotova wishes to show you one of our new city attractions; it’s called the Park of Culture and Rest.”
“How lovely,” I said, nodding gamely toward Polina and then Ivy. “Thank you.”
“Let’s be off, then,” Ivy said, and Polina bobbed her chin in approval. I was relieved to see that both women had dressed much as I had—fur coat and hat, gloves, kid-lined boots over stockinged feet.
But while my companions within the spacious sedan sat warm and full-bodied, their cheeks colored with blush, I saw quite a different scenario as I looked out the windows.
There, in the dreary streets, women hunched forward, their brittle shoulders curling into postures of permanent and self-protective slouching. The men, some of them with noses tipped black by frostbite, carried hunger in their eyes that did not look as if it could be sated by food alone—though food was surely needed as well. Most of the people I saw around the city appeared pale to the point of grayness, their gaunt features pulled tight, their eyes weary but ever vigilant. I thought back to the night of my dinner party, and I couldn’t help but feel a pang in my stomach at the memory of the plentiful spread I had offered. And then that feeling curdled into something even more dreadful with the recollection of the terror that had traveled on those soft sleigh bells. I couldn’t help but shiver right there in that car as I looked out at the street and wondered: How many of the people that we now passed had lost a loved one?
But Madam Molotova’s voice interrupted my gloomy musings just then as she pointed out the window, saying, “Ah, here we are. You see over there?”
I forced myself to focus, looking toward where she pointed her gloved finger. The car slowed to a crawl alongside a vast, flat, snow-covered field. On the far side, there appeared to be some sort of amusement park with rides. Though it must have been a few hundred acres, only a handful of people milled around the empty space.